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I am pleased to announce that TheServerSide (TSS), including TSS.com, TSS.NET, and TSS Java Symposium, are now part of TechTarget, a technology media company that operates a network of targeted IT websites, magazines, and conferences. TheServerSide Communities are now in an environment where our aspirations as a community-serving media group are better aligned and we will be receiving greater support and investment.

The move came as a result of TechTarget's recent acquisition of the assets of The Middleware Company from Veritas. While a greater future is in store for TheServerSide, The Middleware Company and its consulting and research businesses have been discontinued. As many TSS members have pointed out, TMC's activities, particularly in the research space, were not well aligned with those of TheServerSide.

However, the best parts of the former TMC will live on. TechTarget will find a new home for the SOA Blueprints initiative and also for the Torpedo O/R benchmark. TMC's training business was already sold last year to DevelopMentor. And of course, TSS will continue.

So does this mean for you? First, you can rest assured that TechTarget has no intention of making wholesale changes to TSS to make it fit some "TechTarget model." The company has been very successful in serving targeted IT markets and realizes that each market has its own unique formula for success, which needs to be preserved.

Everything I've experienced at TechTarget so far has indicated this to be true. The entire staff of TSS, some of whom have been here since its launch in May of 2000, will continue in their roles. In addition to TSS.com and TSS.NET, our group will also be responsible for TechTarget's SearchWebServices.com site – a further indication of TechTarget's respect for our ability to serve the developer and architect market.

But we're very excited not because things will stay the same – but because they're going to get even better. TechTarget has already committed to increased investment in editorial resources. This will allow us to add more content and features to TSS, as well as launching additional communities. We will continue to run TheServerSide Java Symposium and are looking at additional conference opportunities to take advantage of TechTarget's resources. In short, we now have the investment and backing that will allow us to better serve your needs.

So, that said, we'd like to hear from you! Now that you have a freer and more capable TSS to serve you, what are the top kinds of new content you think would be useful for us to add? What communities do you think are aching for a new TSS? Thanks for your continued support of TSS. What can we do to make a difference for you?

Congratulations to Floyd, Dion, and the rest of the crew. This sounds like a much better fit, so I hope it turns out well.

How about a community focused on the new architectures being developed and refined? AOP, IoC, etc. There always seems to be a tension between the tried-and-true crowd and the new-shiny-better crowd (and then there are those of us in the middle with one foot in each camp). I don't think these discussions should be exclusive to this new community, but it would be a place for more in-depth discussions and help to filter some of the newest and shiniest baubles out of the view of those who aren't interested.

To provide suggestions on how TechTarget can improve TSS, it would be helpful to know what parameters you are operating in.What does TechTarget see as the revenue model for TSS, aside from selling ads on the site?

TechTarget's revenue model (like TheServerSide's) is from online advertising and conferences. The current plans are to continue as such.

TechTarget's revenue model (like TheServerSide's) is from online advertising and conferences. The current plans are to continue as such. Floyd

I may be wrong, but I believe that you guys can potentially bring in more revenue and goodwill from your conferences than from your ads.

The reason I mention this, is that I notice that every other TechTarget site is virtually unreadable. Interesting content is buried in small, plain text, amidst an avalanche of ads and links to Techtarget-affiliated content.

When the Techtarget brass approaches you about redesigning the TSS site to become a recognizable member of the Techtarget network, you may want to point out that it is TSS's convenient and accessible format that encourages some of the very bright, accomplished people to congregate here. Which in turn encourages them to speak at, or attend, your conferences. Which in turn will probably bring in more money in the long run than tripling your ad space will.

Now that TMC is gone, how about TSS do a study of open source stack versus commercial stack? A comparison of say Jonas, JBoss, weblogic and websphere. One thing I've wanted to do for a while, but haven't had time is this. Take two applications, one light weight using just servlet container and one heavy weight using EJB. Deploy it on all the server and run a series of benchmarks measuring performance as it relates to concurrent requests and requests per second. I've done similar tests with Tomcat in the past, but I still haven't had time to compare the various servers. Of course the benchmark wouldn't be conclusive, but it would serve as a nice baseline.

this way, developers can see how a certain type of application performs and see how it's done.

Now that TMC is gone, how about TSS do a study of open source stack versus commercial stack? A comparison of say Jonas, JBoss, weblogic and websphere. One thing I've wanted to do for a while, but haven't had time is this. Take two applications, one light weight using just servlet container and one heavy weight using EJB. Deploy it on all the server and run a series of benchmarks measuring performance as it relates to concurrent requests and requests per second. I've done similar tests with Tomcat in the past, but I still haven't had time to compare the various servers. Of course the benchmark wouldn't be conclusive, but it would serve as a nice baseline.this way, developers can see how a certain type of application performs and see how it's done.

Heh. I interviewed for a position with TMC doing those research studies, and suggested a study like this, comparing the scalability and productivity of a WebWork/Spring/Hibernate stack vs. a full J2EE stack... The problem was I was thinking of what would be helpful to the community, not what they could get people to pay for. Maybe that was the reason I didn't get the job... I'm glad now, as I'd be out of work.

I see these kinds of questions asked on several mailing lists, so it would be a great benefit to the community. I keep trying to find time to do it, but it takes too much with a fulltime job and doing OSS in my freetime :)

then again I could be wrong and no one cares for studies comparing open source to commercial. I use both commercial and open source, but when there's no budget, OSS has saved my butt more than once.

I guess congratulations are in order, well done Floyd. I hope you're starting to become a rich man, I know who's going to be buying the round next time we meet. :-)Great work, keep it up!-John-

John, the congragulations should definitely not be mine alone, TSS could not have gotten here without our amazing and dedicated team, who made these sites as much a labour of love for them as it was for me:

Floydps - the team listed above is continueing with their same roles, as am I - I will be Publisher of the Application Development Media Group which consists of TheServerSide Communities and SearchWebServices.com.

John, the congragulations should definitely not be mine alone, TSS could not have gotten here without our amazing and dedicated team, who made these sites as much a labour of love for them as it was for me:&nbsp;- Dion Almaer - TSS.com Editor

Why do you still keep TSS.net running? I doubt it will ever gain traction as .NET developers are not going to look beyond the MSDN site and maybe a couple of other ones officially sponsored by MSFT. Plus, in the .NET land, there just aren't that much materials to cover besides what MSDN already covers - no open source frameworks (well, very few), no competing vendors and products (no OR mapping, no EJB's, no MVC, no IoC), no religious fights, no gossips, except every some is guessing the exact time when Longhorn will come out.

Why do you still keep TSS.net running? I doubt it will ever gain traction as .NET developers are not going to look beyond the MSDN site and maybe a couple of other ones officially sponsored by MSFT.

Eric, the traffic on TSS.NET is already at 1.8 million pageviews / month even though we just launched it in January. It's been growing 20% month on month and I think it can quintuple in traffic within a few years.

Plus, in the .NET land, there just aren't that much materials to cover besides what MSDN already covers

You are correct that the .NET community does not need the exact same type of content that the Java community does. This doesn't mean there is no room for a commmunity site like a TSS to serve them, it just means taht we have to adapt TSS.NET to the needs of that audience, and make sure it is differentiated from any other .NET sites, and I think we're getting there.

Why do you still keep TSS.net running? I doubt it will ever gain traction as .NET developers are not going to look beyond the MSDN site and maybe a couple of other ones officially sponsored by MSFT.

Couldn't agree with Floyd more - the "ServerSide format" as I like to call it is something desperately needed in the .NET community to break developers away from that purely MS-guided approach to using the technology.

IMO, it allows us to put content out that elevates the thinking of developers and architects when approaching solutions. It's true that MSDN has raised its game with its Architecture and Developer centers, and some of the employee blogs really lead the way in terms of seeing inside the company, but there's always that innate distrust when reading things from MS (no matter the quality of the info) as to whether or not you're reading something that's good for you in your job or just simply touts the party line.

Plus, in the .NET land, there just aren't that much materials to cover besides what MSDN already covers - no open source frameworks (well, very few), no competing vendors and products (no OR mapping, no EJB's, no MVC, no IoC), no religious fights, no gossips, except every some is guessing the exact time when Longhorn will come out.

There are always competing products in the .NET space to consider - databases platforms and OR mapping tools (these are emerging) alone are two very relevant topics for discussion in the space.

Floyd also made another good point in saying that it's not that .NET community doesn't have much material to cover, but that its hot points are different. The dearth of open source frameworks is just such an issue - people are interested in looking into this from a .NET perspective and they really need a forum that can act as a staging area for that discourse. TSS.NET will provide that in time.

And absolutely everyone has given up trying to figure out when Longhorn is coming out. ;-)

Plus, in the .NET land, there just aren't that much materials to cover besides what MSDN already covers - no open source frameworks (well, very few), no competing vendors and products (no OR mapping, no EJB's, no MVC, no IoC), no religious fights, no gossips, except every some is guessing the exact time when Longhorn will come out.

TSS.NET is becoming a thriving community, even without the religious revery that the Java world tends to instigate. TSS.NET has been in existance less than 1/4 the length of time of TSS.COM and we are already nearly half its size in terms of readers.

There are many vendors and OSS groups in the .NET space selling everything from ORM tools, IDEs, Code generators, etc. Perhaps you should spend a bit more time in the .NET world before writing our epitaph.

As a Microsoft developer through and through (been using MS technologies since graduating in 1997) and currently specialising in C#, I couldn't disagree more. Even though I have never programmed Java, and for that matter have no real intentions of doing so, the .NET era now means that we have much more in common with our Java based colleagues than most MS devs would acknowledge, if they even realize they do.Tools like NUnit have become very popular and I have high hopes for the .NET port of Hibernate, especially in the light of MS ObjectSpaces disappearing of the face of the earth. It's only through the likes of TSS that these projects will ever gain the recognition that they deserve.Another area that I believe TSS is very strong in compared to the a lot of .NET sites is that it does not simply rehash MSDN content. A lot of these sites other do not even bother to add any comment on the original MSDN articles. All they succeed in doing is making it more frustrating to find any decent content on google by poluting my search results.I am and will remain an avid fan of both TSS.net and TSS.com. Keep up the good work

Floyd, I obviously extend me congratulations to the entire team, I was being politically cautious by not mentioning the others, as with the other comment to your posting I wasn't sure who was there and who wasn't.

Well done guys, it looks like I need to make a trip to Boston to get some free drinks! :-)

...you're starting to become a rich man, I know who's going to be buying the round next time we meet. :-)Great work, keep it up!-John-

John, also, remember that TechTarget bought TSS from Veritas, not the employees (TMC was first sold by the employees to Precise Software back in 2002). So, it might have to be a round of domestics instead of import beers next time. :)

I have been viewing TSS.com since the beginning and benefited from it greatly over the years. I am extremely exited to see the great things to come!!!!

That said, I'd love to see some of your topics cover more around complex Web Service implemenations and endeavors around shared service data Objects. Specifically, I’d like to see commentary about products/solutions leveraging base technologies like Jini and JXTA to provide/facilitate SOA's. I think that, as an industry, we need more dynamic service architectures that can leverage any type of underlying container (J2EE, .NET etc.) and share complex data Objects in grids.

In the mean time, congratulations!!! Keep the great info flowing!!!!! :)

Careful now... The increased traffic might make JDOCentral.com break the 2 post a day average they've had for the past couple months... Are you sure the rack of servers hosting jdocentral.com could handle the load of maybe 3 posts a day?

For the past few years we have seen a lot of excellent feedback from the Open Source community. We have also seen this community grow as a result. I crave more than just reviews of Open Source libraries and packages. It is great to hear about this stuff but, I think there needs to be a balance with other communities in industry as well.

I would like to see more executive-level articles. I would to see articles and other information on TSS that I could share with my CTOs and CIOs. How about some interviews with CTOs and CIOs who are actually successfully using some of the products, technologies and libraries that people discuss on TSS? Something from the user community would be nice.

I am sure my fellow TSS members are shivering and shaking your fists at the screen in anger at me right now. But, the reality is that there is a huge community of developers working at large organizations who don’t have the luxury of being able to choose whatever technologies we want at any moment of the day. We have to build solid cases for purchasing or even using FREE software. (gasp!) The more information we have that we can share with Executives the better it is for the entire community. To me it is a win-win situation.

As well, I would like to see more original content on TSS from the community of readers on a more regular basis. The news postings are great and the feedback is typically excellent but, I would love to hear from some of TSS’ more controversial contributors in a more focused article-like manner. (i.e. Rolf – Now I will be flamed for sure.)

Conclusion: I would like to use The Server Side as a tool to help share information about emerging technologies with my executives. I find myself searching for hours for good articles on technology solutions from creditable sources that are more “general media” than the typical research firms. I think there are a number of people in the TSS community who can contribute this kind of content… Time to explore it!

Congrats, Floyd. I am really happy for you, Dion and the rest of the team (though I admittedly don't know them as well as I should).

Hopefully TechTarget will offer you the freedom to choose your own open media direction in the future. I think you have shown from your beginnings that you know how to do it and deserve that right. This will be the key to preserving TSS as a user community-driven forum. At that point any research projects and would-be analyst aspirations can be left behind as just a bad dream in a [hopefully] forgotten part of TSS lore.<g>

1. Any time you do any technology comparisons, don't just focus on "performance". Please include other metrics (even if they are subjective) such as: ease of use, learning curve, pricing, value-added/useful [vendor-specific] features, tech support responsiveness, etc. I work in IT and performance is only one piece of the equation when doing any kind of evaluation.

2. I'd like to see some discussion around "business rules" and where they should reside (client tier, db stored procedure, business logic layer, 3rd-party tool like a business rules engine, etc). For example, where would you put a business rule if it needs to be used for data entry (form) validation, but also enforced by the logic layer when actually executing the data transactions (assuming the logic layer can be accessed by other clients).

3. Conference/forum/workshop suggestions. We are beginning an initiative to deliver a single sign-on solution to our business app users. The options/approaches out there are endless. I would pay to go to a workshop that brought together people from [IT and vendors] different segments in the industry contributing their approaches to solving that problem. In other words, how are other IT shops solving the same problems we are trying to solve. This is just one topic, I can probably suggest others that we need to tackle

One thing I've been looking for is a site that's one step out from Freshmeat. I love the way TSS gives exposure to new projects (commercial and OSS), it is my main link to what is really going on.

But, I do chafe a bit when I see an annoucement for "Web App Framework #6.02 x 10^23 releases version 1.0". What I really want is someone (who has the time) to get in there and play with the announced projects. Then write up your findings: how does this project compare with other projects in the space? what are the other projects in this space? what are the major decision points that would lead you to pick one project over another.

I know this could be considered middleware research, so I understand if this isn't in the TSS charter. But these are the questions I have, and If I had all the time in the world this is what I would do.

Thanks everyone for all your ideas. We will consider them all carefully when making our plans for next year.

In the meantime, we are in need of a full time developer for TSS' infrastructure and can also hire on an additional full time Editor (someone like a Dion or me). If you know of anyone who loves TSS, is already active in the community, likes writing, and are addicted to bleeding edge but can also work hard / project manage, email me!

Thanks everyone for all your ideas. We will consider them all carefully when making our plans for next year.

Im sure you will, untill your management tells you what to do (and how to earn your paycheck). But then again, we heard and saw it all before: do one thing and preach the other!

Does anybody really care how much TSS is worth? And what makes them think that the interests of TechTarget and java community will go in the same direction? And what will happen when they dont? Will TSS come forward and tell us? Doesnt this sound so familiar ??

I hope this is the end of TTS (I mean TTS.COM - TTS.NET is a joke. Number of replies for each article says it all. It worked with Java - .NET is a totally diff world and I hope you see that your business model is just not applicable any more.)

Let's hope that we can have a new start and get back to the days when great articles were being published and people actually responded with useful feedback as opposed to the last 12 months or so when every discussion has dengenerated into some sort of Java v .NET argument. That kind of stuff is pathetic, boring and quite frankly ruins the whole site.

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